Dec 11, 2013

Scalable Straight Through Processing System (OLTP) vs OLAP in Java

Large mission critical applications use Straight Through Processing, and these systems need to be highly scalable. So, when you apply for these high paying jobs, it really pays to prepare for your job interviews with the following questions and answers.

Q. What is Straight Through Processing (STP)?A. This is the definition from INVESTOPEDIA.

"An initiative used by companies in the financial world to optimize the speed at which transactions are processed. This is performed by allowing information that has been electronically entered to be transferred from one party to another in the settlement process without manually re-entering the same pieces of information repeatedly over the entire sequence of events."

Q. How will you go about designing a STP system?A. Most conceptual architectures use a hybrid approach using a combination of different architectures based on the benefits of each approach and its pertinence to your situation. Here is a sample hybrid approach depicting an online trading system, which is a STP system.

The above system is designed for:

Placing Buy/Sell online trades real time. The trades are validated first and then sent all the way to Stock Exchange system using the FIX (Financial Information eXchange) protocol. Here some usefil links on FIX.

Once the trade is matched, the contract notes are asynchrnously issued via the SETTLEMENT queue, and processed by an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) system like web Methods, Tibco, or Websophere MQ. Here are some useful links on asynchronous processing.